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Now being delivered to boardrooms, offices and front doors all over the country." AM EXPRESS HOUSE & GARDEN BtRTHDAY · ANNIVERSARY. GET WELL. CONGRATULATIONS end of the book. This slight plot bears a large burden of philosophy, but the burden is lightened by Mr. Smith's many graceful and precise phrases The veteran, for instance, having just succumbed to one of his daydreams, "shook his head like a dog emerging from water with a stone in its mouth." THE HEAD OF ALVISE, by Lina Wert- müller (Morrow; $12.50). This fable about evil and envy begins in Venice in 1939, when the narra- tor, named Sammy, is stil] a child (American and Jewish) but is a]- ready spiritually stunted and de- formed. Sammy takes an instant loathing to a saintly young Italian (also Jewish, and the son of fami- ly friends) named Alvise. When Alvise explains to Sammy who Sa- lome and John the Baptist were (his family owns a painting of the dancer, the platter, and the head), the story's theme begins to emerge. A short time later, both boys are tak- en to visit relatives in Poland but, instead, find themselves orphaned and interned in a concentration camp. Alvise cleverly plots their es- cape; once they are on Ellis Island and out of danger, Sammy (infuriat- ed by his indebtedness) shakes off his "guardian angel." The story then shifts to New York forty years later, when the two meet again. Sammy, who has made his name as a mystery writer, resolves to do in Alvise, who has gained everything from a Nobel Prize (for poetry) to a beautiful wife, all without losing his modesty and grace. Sammy as- sembles the supplies for six perfect crimes, but each attempt backfires, in a crescendo of painful slapstick. Before Lina Wertmüller became a movie director, she wrote for travelling puppet shows; this story (her first novel), with its minimal cast, simple morals, manic chatter, and frenetic scenario, seems derived from such a stage, if also adaptable to the screen. UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES, by Richard Kluger (Doubleday; $19.95). A vast and tiresome three- part novel about a young man of "in- corrigible rectitude" who through- out his three-part experiences during the nineteen-thirties-as a poor, bright boy at Harvard, an educational adviser at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, and a low-ranking reporter ("newspa- pering" is what he calls the busi- ness) in New York-ponders Amer- AUGUST 16, 1982 ica's three-part promise, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The political left ( from Liberal Club do-gooders to card-carrying Communists) and the political right (often employers and potential fathers-in-law) try to win him over with their interpretations of those three terms, but his ambitions rarely coincide with theirs for long. If these sometime allies were his worst enemies, his story would be tedious enough; but it is the author, with his incorrigibly garbled prose, who does him in. "There was something there, he could tell-there had to be," we read as a cool young heiress urges him not to join the Newspaper Guild. "Something in her that was responding in contained measure to the pull on him the very sight of her exerted " GENER.Al THE SHABUNIN AFFAIR: AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF LEO TOLSTOY, by Walter Kerr (Cornell; $14.95). Turning to history, the noted jour- nalist recounts a tragedy that con- tributed to the evolution of T 01- stoy's writing-the novel "Resur- rection" -and to his philosophy of nonviolence. In the summer of 1866, Tolstoy interrupted his work on "War and Peace" when two Army officers he knew asked him to serve as defense counsel for an en- listed man who faced trial before a mili tary court for striking an officer -a capital crime. Presumably be- cause Tolstoy had been an Army officer and had studied law, the court accepted him as an attorney. He argued that the defendant, Vasili Shabunin, was not guilty, because he was insane. The plea was re- jected, but Tolstoy was confident that an appeal he dispatched to the Czar through his cousin Alexandra, a lady-in-waiting at the court, would bring a commutation of the sentence. Instead, the Minister of War rejected the petition on a tech- nicality, and Shabunin was executed before a correction, which Tolstoy forwarded from his country estate, could be presented to the Czar at St. Petersburg. Tolstoy thought his in- adequate argument had cost a life, and, out of remorse and shame, at- tempted to conceal the Incident. But by the first decade of this century he had become so eminent that none of his doings could remain secret, and he at last responded to attacks and queries, in 1908, with a long letter